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The increased participation of women in the labour force was one of the most significant changes to Canadian social life during the quarter century after the close of the Second World War. Transforming Labour offers one of the first critical assessments of women's paid labour in this era, a period when more and more women, particularly those with families, were going 'out to work'. Using case studies from across Canada, Joan Sangster explores a range of themes, including women's experiences within unions, Aboriginal women's changing patterns of work, and the challenges faced by immigrant women. By charting women's own efforts to ameliorate their work lives as well as factors that re-shaped the labour force, Sangster challenges the commonplace perception of this era as one of conformity, domesticity for women, and feminist inactivity. Working women's collective grievances fuelled their desire for change, culminating in challenges to the status quo in the 1960s, when they voiced their discontent, calling for a new world of work and better opportunities for themselves and their daughters. --Publisher's description

The article reviews the book, "Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865-1920," by Lara Vapnek.

Since the 1960s, if not before, oral history and working-class history have been a dynamic duo, complimenting and overlapping, but also challenging and questioning each other. Both lay and professional historians have been in the forefront of efforts to recuperate, interpret, and preserve the oral histories of working-class individuals and communities across the globe. They created written histories, archival collections, museum exhibits, and community projects that gave workers, their families, and their communities -- those who were less likely to leave archival and written sources for posterity -- a new voice, and a new place in history. Working-class oral history has also encompassed far more than recovery and preservation. Labour historians have enriched the field of oral history by addressing questions about method, theory, and approach, by offering critical reflections on our assumptions and expectations about oral history practice. Oral history has similarly enriched the field of working-class history, posing new questions, challenging existing interpretations, and encouraging the diversification of the themes and subjects we study. In recognition of this dynamic relationship, and the ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between oral and working-class history, Oral History Forum commissioned this special issue. --Introduction

Pays homage to the union organizer and labor leader, Madeleine Parent.

Provides a critical appreciation of the television series, "Bomb Girls," as a pedagogical tool and as Canadian historical fiction in the context of American-dominated culture industry. Concludes that while the series is limited in its understanding of class relations, it nonetheless is of value for students to consider the relationship between mass media, representation and working women.

The article reviews the book, "On Gender, Labor and Inequality," by Ruth Milkman.

Explores the evolution of a new women's labour history in the post-1960s era, with attention to the similarities and differences characterizing scholarship in Britain, Canada and the United States. The debates the field animated, and how these shifted over time as the political and intellectual context changed, are critically and comparatively examined. By tracing the movement of ideas, themes and inspiration across borders, one can gain a better understanding of the transnational creation of a feminist labour history.

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canadaand the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts fromthe1940s to the1970s.Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentationof the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants,but the legacyof earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.

This article uses a case study of a highly publicized 1970 controversy over Canadian Pacific Air Lines’ flight attendant uniforms—specifically, a switch from mini to midi skirt—as a case study in business-labor relations concerning the regulation of women workers’ bodily appearance. Using company and union records and employing a historical, materialist, and feminist analysis, we trace how notions of aesthetic and emotional labor changed over time in relation to the political economy, gender ideologies, and the agency of workers themselves. The flight attendants’ reluctance to challenge the airline’s sexist advertising indicated how both accommodation and resistance were intertwined in complex ways in the workplace. Their acceptance of more “thigh in the sky” had much to do with a highly regulated and disciplined workplace, an entrenched division of labor on the airplane, and gendered notions of beauty and glamour in the industry, including women’s strategic use of beauty on the job to their own advantage.

Interpretations of Aboriginal women's work have shifted over time, but they have been absolutely central to First Nations women's experiences of colonialism. Yet, in both women's history and Aboriginal history, there has been a "mystification" of Indigenous women's labor, because it was often defined as nonproductive or marginal within capitalist economies; wage work was particularly neglected (Littlefield and Knack 1999: 4). Yet, by studying women's labor in its multiple forms (paid, unpaid, voluntary, ceremonial, commodity production), and in multiple contexts (bush, urban, reserve or reservation), we can gain immense insight into how colonialism was structured, experienced, negotiated, and resisted by women at the level of daily life. By perusing past academic writing on Aboriginal women and work, this paper explores some of the intellectual, political, and social influences that have shaped understandings of Aboriginal women's labor in Canada and the United States, asking what insights we have gained, what questions we need to answer, and what contradictions we still face in our research. Arguably, we need a dialogue that crosses disciplines and theoretical approaches, with perspectives and traditions from Aboriginal history, feminist theory, and labor studies informing and challenging each other. There are transnational trends and shared perspectives in Aboriginal women's history that cross the 49th parallel; however, we also need to identify how and why national and regional histories and interpretations diverge. Still, one transnational commonality highlighted in this paper is the close connection between politics and research, between the present and the past: the questions posed by scholars have been stimulated and inspired by Aboriginal thought and organizing, and Aboriginal politics have benefited from scholarly research. Although research may still be difficult and contested terrain in Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal relations (Smith 1999; Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997), there is hope that scholarly dialogue might contribute productively to decolonization. --From Introduction

This paper examines union grievances dealing with the body, appearance and demeanour fought by the Canadian Air Line Flight Attendants Association, on behalf of its female and male members over a 30-year period. Taking a historical, materialist-feminist approach, we examine how workers used the grievance system to resist regulations they believed contradicted their right to dignified labour. We ask how and why bodily regulation differed for men and women, and how this changed over time, as the union merged its male and female job occupations. Using arbitrated grievances, union records and discussion of these issues in the mass media, we show how both feminism and service union activism encouraged flight attendant resistance to airlines’ efforts to regulate the appropriate body and attire for male and female workers. The use of labour law offered workers some respite from regulation, but did not facilitate fundamental questions about the power of management to ‘dress’ its workers.

Announces the co-editorship of Charles Smith and Joan Sangster for this volume, and gratefully acknowledges the work of former editors as well as funding from OPSEU. The journal is a joint partnership of the Canadian Committee on Labour History and the Canadian Association of Work Studies. Seeks submissions that reflect new directions in the study of the workplace and labour, including analyses of labour and the state, feminist political economy, strikes and workplace conflict, union renewal, new models of worker organizing, environmental justice, Indigenous struggles inside and outside the workplace, global workers’ movements, anti-racism campaigns, lgbtq2s struggles. Also welcomes contributions on the social world of work, e.g., popular and working-class cultures, the gendered and racialized experiences of workers, the intersections between colonialism and labour, and the many permutations of labour in the past and present – informal, paid, unpaid, coerced, voluntary.

Editorial on three conferences held in 2018-19 that examined the past, present and future of the study of working-class history.